An inside source said: "It looks like they asked someone who didn't really know much about Dylan to find footage for the report. Perhaps when you're in your 20s one old rock star looks pretty much like another. But anyone editing the package should have known something was wrong. Dylan's voice isn't exactly smooth, but this guy sounded like someone strangling a cat!"

It's Finland's 100th birthday next year, and there has been a social media campaign to get Norway to give Finland the summit of Halti mountain, which is already partly in Finland, with the summit just 66 feet inside of Norway. It would hardly change the border at all to redraw the map to put the summit on the Finnish side.

Clinton's RCP average in a 4-person race is only 44.4%. You've got to imagine the missing top of this graph. Picture an empty space that's larger than what you see here, which tops out at 45%:

That's more than 55% of voters who do not support Clinton, and you've got to figure a good portion of those who do support her only support her out of rejection of Donald Trump. In fact, that's the main argument her campaign is making for her. She also lays claim to all the liberals who loathed her in the primaries and wanted Bernie Sanders. We're headed into what could be a landslide victory for someone that almost nobody likes.

I'm searching for an up side to this. Perhaps it's bad to have a beloved President. Is Obama beloved? Yes, to a great extent he is. Here's his approval rating over time. It doesn't look that great, but I think we Americans are mostly liking and trusting him and, as a consequence, not getting as outraged about things that should be bothering us. The new President will not be loved and may very well be hated. And all the things we've let slide as we indulged the well-liked Obama are going to fall heavily into the lap of the new, loathed President who we're not going to cut any slack.

I'm trying to say there's some good in that: 1. We'll have to face reality (or something close to that), 2. We'll break out of our complacent funk and get back to our old tradition of sharply criticizing the President, 3. We'll stop looking to the President for spiritual uplift and pseudo-religious hope of salvation.

October 14, 2016

That's "Younger Girl," a cover of a Lovin' Spoonful song, written by John Sebastian. That was the first we heard from The Critters in 1966 — my all-time favorite music year, half a century ago. (Compare the Spoonful version, here. And compare "Prison Wall Blues," which some people say is the source of "Younger Girl.")

Ciccone wrote the follow-up single — also from 1966 — which lacks that spritely joy of the Spoonful song, "Mr. Dieingly Sad":

Said Hillary Clinton, talking about the last debate to Ellen DeGeneres. She also said: "He was really all wrought up, and you could just sense how much anger he had."

Sexist claptrap, in my opinion, but Trump's response, which starts out okay, ends in what I'm seeing as a rape joke:

“So I’m standing at my podium by my chair. She walks across the room. She’s standing in front of me, right next to me,” Trump claimed.“And the next day I said what did the papers say? They said, ‘he invaded her space,’” he said. “Believe me, the last space that I want to invade is her space.”

IN THE COMMENTS: A lot of people are unable or unwilling to see the innuendo that I see, perhaps because you want to protect Trump. For example I Have Misplaced My Pants says:

I see no evidence that he is referring to Clinton's [I presume Althouse suggests] vagina. Althouse, you have a dirty mind. You do this a lot. Is your mind and your blog--just want to counterbalance!

On the other hand, Unknown says:

Of course he was using double entendre. How dense are you people?

And then there is EDH:

Althouse: "ends in what I'm seeing as a rape joke" ... which I guess is okay if you're a liberal, like Norman Lear?

... this is drawing with a finger on the iPhone screen... and Meade said it looked "foxy," so I tried to draw a fox. On seeing that my winner of the rat contest looked like a mouse and the runner-up looked like a dog, I started to think of casting about for another animal to misdraw.

... and I think that they are talking about the kind of sexual harassment claim that is based on rough language — jokes and remarks with sexual content — and the photographs of naked women that might get displayed on some guy's computer screen.

At some point, speech and the display of pictures in the workplace really can properly be seen as creating unequal conditions for women in the workplace, and people who care about that equality should want to think about where that point is. There are also freedom of speech interests on the other side. "The Opie and Anthony Show" isn't a good place to display your knowledge and thoughtfulness on this subject, and that's why it might be a good idea not to indulge in this kind of banter if you're going to get involved in politics.

I'm inclined to shrug this one off. It's years ago, it's Trump's son, and it's casual banter. I'm most uneasy about the idea that women are being too fussy and therefore should stick with jobs that are already designed to accommodate female sensitivities. That's bad, but I can imagine a decent person who might just blurt that out.

I'd like for it to be possible for a free-speaking, real person to run for office. When I've found Trump (Sr.) appealing, it's because it has seemed that he'd broken down barriers and shown that it is good to speak expressively and to come right out and say the things it had seemed we weren't supposed to say. About a year ago, I had a dream in which I thanked him for showing that we don't have to be so repressed.

But at some point, these things accumulate, and you think: That's too much. And yet: Be careful. When a person has opponents, and they know these things accumulate, they can dribble out one thing after another and cause you to think it's too much. There are just so many things! But the things, individually, may, on careful inspection, be nothing. A lot of zeroes are not a lot. They're still nothing.

With Trump, the things are not all zeroes, and we may be so fed up that we don't care enough anymore to look closely to see what is really a zero or close to zero. If so, we empower the dribblers.

In English originally "book learning" (in which sense it replaced Old English boccræft); the meaning "activity of a writer, the profession of a literary writer" is first attested 1779 in Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets;" that of "literary productions as a whole, body of writings from a period or people" is first recorded 1812.

Ezra Pound never won. Nor did Ezra Pound really fight with T.S. Eliot in the captain's tower, whatever that is. Back when "Desolation Row" came out, it was 1965, and we would have assumed that something called "the captain's tower" was a phallus, but people don't talk like that anymore. And why didn't Sigmund Freud win the Nobel Prize in Literature? That was some kick-ass literature he wrote. It came out in book form, and people read those books.

Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II, he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage, which he said triggered a mental breakdown: "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

Oh, Ezra. There are winners and losers, and he's a big time loser. But he said — see above — "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." He didn't say, it's got to be read. He said it is language, the best of language. That would include words written to be heard, not read, if only the words were good enough. But he had terrible political judgment.

Yet you are the literalist perhaps, and politics has no part in your assessment of the meaning of words. Literature is stuff that you read, and Bob Dylan's songs are designed to be heard mixed up with sounds from musical instruments, sounds that are not words at all.

But the Nobel Committee is not a committee on precision in language, and it controls the scope of the meaning of its prize. It doesn't have to give the prize to the person who most closely embodies the meaning of the name of the prize. And anyway, the committee is operating in Swedish. If you're so hot to be literal, start speaking Swedish.

"Mr. Dylan has put his words out into the world in vessels with too many dimensions to be broken down into elements: as songs. Think of a song as thrillingly alive with the furies of creation, discovery and experiment, with the resolution of each verse reaching a pitch of such insistence, humor and force that the next has to push further or die. Think of 'Highway 61 Revisited,' from 1965 — a song that Mr. Dylan performed last week at the Desert Trip festival in Indio, Calif...."

That's Greil Marcus, writing in the NYT putting an important spin on the argument why it made sense for Bob Dylan to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: It's not whether a song can be detached from its music and regarded as a poem, but the song as a song, at one with its music.

And I love Marcus's first paragraph, on why it's not surprising that the novelist Don DeLillo did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year.

October 13, 2016

Perhaps most worrisome for Democrats is what’s going on in Wisconsin. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s re-election campaign looked all but dead. The powerful Koch brothers pulled money out of the state as Democrat Russ Feingold consistently led in the polls. But two new polls this week showed Johnson trailing by just 2 or 3 percentage points, and a third gave Johnson a lead, despite Clinton’s advantage in the state seeming to grow....

ADDED: It makes perfect sense to me. The more clear it seems that Clinton will win, the more important it becomes to those who worry about her that she should be offset and balanced by a Republican-led Congress. It seems really risky to empower a President Trump with a same-party Congress, but once he's not a threat, the risk-averse among us should gravitate toward a Republican Congress to put a brake on President Clinton.

"... and there are many others who should have won (Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Auden, Levi, Achebe, Borges, Baldwin . . . where to stop?), but, for all the foibles of the prize and its selection committee, can we just bask for a little while in this one? The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the nose."

Writes David Remnick of the "astonishing and unambiguously wonderful thing" that is Bob Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize in literature.

I know what he means, because I understand Dylanspeak. He's gesturing at a song called "Highlands":

Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”
I said, “You’re way wrong”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?” I say, “I read Erica Jong!”
She goes away for a minute
And I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street but nobody’s going anywhere

And I go away for a minute, because I have this rat picture I want you to see:

It's Rattatz, the official rat of the Althouse blog. You voted, remember? I had to run off and get him, because "Highlands" is one of the 5 Dylan songs with "rat":

"... in the movement in the 1960s and ’70s, a distinction that led to friction with both blacks and Jews. Still, Mr. Greenberg helped achieve through the courts what the political system had denied Southern blacks: voting rights, equal pay for equal work, impartial juries, equal access to medical care, equal access to schools and other benefits of citizenship broadly enjoyed by whites."

Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave
“Let’s go and play Adam and Eve”
I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin’
When she said, “Hey man, you crazy or sumpin’
You see what happened last time they started”

So I guess in some way this is also a prize for the American song tradition, to which Bob Dylan belongs, and within which he created new poetic expressions.

The word "tradition" appears in no Bob Dylan song, but Bob Dylan is very devoted to the tradition, and you can really experience that if you listen to his old "Theme Time" radio shows. As far as people "creating" good new things, I don't think you'll find that in Bob Dylan songs. There's bad human creation:

Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61...

That's "Highway 61 Revisited," the first words of which are "Oh God," and you will find God the Creator in Bob Dylan songs:

There’s a kingdom called Heaven
A place where there is no pain of birth
Well the Lord created it, mister
About the same time He made the earth

Not only is there an old hairy-legged, black-sock-wearing man in shorts sitting on a depressing sofa, not only do limp draperies block the light, not only is there a set-up chess board with extra-large pieces... there's a huge statue — double life-sized — of Vladimir Lenin leaning forward intensely as if he's about to get up and kill you.

The article is about a place in Gagra which is in Georgia (or Abkhazia, "a quasi country whose existence only Russia and three other nations recognize"):

Wrote Bob Dylan in his great book "Chronicles." I don't know if the Nobel Committee included that book in its reasons for giving him their big award, but I loved "Chronicles" and blogged it in detail, chapter by chapter, back in 2004. You can find all the old posts with the "Dylan's 'Chronicles'" tag.

Ah! That tag got me to a 2013 post reacting to a NYT piece by Bill Wyman (not that Bill Wyman) about how Bob Dylan could win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I said:

"Sara was trying to get Bob to go to Princeton University, where he was being presented with an honorary doctorate. Bob did not want to go. I said, 'C'mon, Bob it's an honor!' Sara and I both worked on him for a long time. Finally, he agreed. I had a car outside, a big limousine. That was the first thing he didn't like.... When we arrived at Princeton, they took us to a little room and Bob was asked to wear a cap and gown. He refused outright. They said, 'We won't give you the degree if you don't wear this.' Dylan said, 'Fine. I didn't ask for it in the first place.'..."

Anyway, I was thinking about that line "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke," as we were talking about the old aphorism "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel" (which I attributed to Racine, and a commenter said was really from Horace Walpole). Bob Dylan also sings about getting a letter in which he was asked how he was doing: "Was that some kind of joke?" But there's more to comedy than jokes, so his contempt for jokes shouldn't mark him as a nonthinker, even if we take the old Walpole saying as gospel.

But back to that Dylan quote in the title. That's from Chapter 5, the last chapter of "Chronicles," blogged here (where there are links to the posts on the earlier chapters).

How people felt about Communists in northern Minnesota: "People weren't scared of them, seemed to be a big to-do over nothing." P. 271....

My first reaction was: I'd heard this idea floated for a long time, but I didn't take it too seriously. And I'm the kind of deep devotee of Dylan that when I write "take it too seriously," I hear a Dylan song and stop to think what it is. Isn't that a Dylan line? No, I'm thinking "You shouldn’t take it so personal...." — which is "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)." "Seriously" only appears in one Dylan song — if I can trust the search function on his website — and that's here....

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it’s so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

"Visions of Johanna." Sorry if I'm muttering small talk at the... web... while I'm just out of bed...

“His gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,” Dylan went on. “In the song ‘Sisters of Mercy,’ for instance, the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals . . . but the tune is anything but predictable. The song just comes in and states a fact. And after that anything can happen and it does, and Leonard allows it to happen. His tone is far from condescending or mocking. He is a tough-minded lover who doesn’t recognize the brush-off. Leonard’s always above it all. ‘Sisters of Mercy’ is verse after verse of four distinctive lines, in perfect meter, with no chorus, quivering with drama. The first line begins in a minor key. The second line goes from minor to major and steps up, and changes melody and variation. The third line steps up even higher than that to a different degree, and then the fourth line comes back to the beginning. This is a deceptively unusual musical theme, with or without lyrics. But it’s so subtle a listener doesn’t realize he’s been taken on a musical journey and dropped off somewhere, with or without lyrics.”

But let's talk about lyrics, Bob Dylan's lyrics — a singer's lyrics have won the Nobel Prize. I don't think that's happened before. We expect poetry — to be taken so seriously — to stand disengaged from music. But wasn't early poetry sung? Dylan's words, because they were sung, became imprinted on minds. I cannot exaggerate the impression these words made on me when I began listening to the songs half a century ago. Utterly entranced by The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man," I took a chance and bought an album from the "folk" section of the record store: "Bringing It All Back Home." That was Bob's current album at the time The Byrds' single came out, and "Mr. Tambourine Man" was on that album. It was also just before the release of "Highway 61 Revisited," so a summer of bonding to "Bringing It All Back Home" ended with access to the new album. I played those 2 albums continually in 1965, when I was 14. I went back into the old albums, "Another Side Of Bob Dylan" and "The Freewheelin Bob Dylan."

Unlike many of the recordings of the day, Bob Dylan enunciated his words clearly. He was saying unusual things, but you knew what the words were — nothing garbled Louie-Louiesquely — so you got those words lodged in your head, where they would come to mind often, and swirl into your self-generated thoughts, even when you didn't know exactly what he was talking about, there was meaning, meaning to contemplate for the rest of your life.

You could read and try to memorize poems or hear a poet recite his verses — Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg — but because this was music, those words got very deeply rooted. All my life, ever since I was 14, Bob Dylan lyrics have been interlaced with my own thoughts. I can't imagine who I would be without Bob Dylan. I can't begin to unravel my mind back to the point when it didn't contain threads of Bob Dylan. I can't pull out any particular idea of mine that I got from Bob Dylan. I'm not the get-out-of-the-doorway-if-you-can't-lend-a-hand type of Bob Dylan fan, stuck on the political propaganda era, his younger, older days.

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now....

October 12, 2016

When asked about Hillary Clinton potentially stacking the court with liberal justices, Ginsburg said she resisted "the notion that, if you are a Democrat, then you are 'liberal.'"

"Just think of John Paul Stevens appointed by President Ford, then Souter appointed by the first President Bush," she said. "They were not 'conservative.'"

I'd like to see the whole quote, but 2 examples of Republicans who turned out not to be conservative does not make me think it's at all likely that Democrats will turn out not to be liberal. When's the last time that happened? Felix Frankfurter?

"... describing to the attractive young psychiatrist in the chair opposite me how I had always had to develop elaborate compensatory strategies for getting through my school work, how staying with any one thing was a challenge for me, how I was best at jobs that required elaborate multitasking, like waitressing. Untrue, all of it. I was a focused student and a terrible waitress. And yet these were the answers that I discovered from the briefest online research were characteristic of the A.D.H.D. diagnostic criteria. These were the answers they were looking for in order to pick up their pens and write down 'Adderall, 20 mg, once a day' on their prescription pads. So these were the answers I gave. Fifty minutes later, I was standing on San Vicente Boulevard in the bright California sun, prescription slip in hand."

... that a lot of people would like to just be able to vote for Obama again. Close your eyes, hold your knows,* think a happy song — here, he'll sing it for you...

... and you can believe if you want to believe: You're not really voting for Hillary Clinton. You're voting for Obama.

_______________________

* I assure you I intended to write "hold your nose." I only saw the mistake after I published. I'm leaving the mistake though, because sometimes a mistake is delightful. I wish I could imagine a mistake that could get us out of the jam we're in with this election. Leaping into dreadful uncertainty, hold your knows!

"We have nothing but respect for the fine work of the Academy Award-winning actress Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Trump’s comments regarding her ‘pieces’ were lewd, vulgar, and entirely unacceptable. Our candy’s name was never meant to be used in the service of such crass wordplay. We hope that, this Halloween season, our entire line of candies will continue to represent what they have represented since 1928—wholesome and sweet American treats that in no way promote the reduction of powerful women to their anatomical parts."

Iran beat South Korea in the World Cup qualifying match, but it was the eve of Ashura, the Shiite's "most solemn and sorrowful holiday" and "the religious authorities said the match could proceed if the stadium were turned into a place of mourning, with black banners commemorating the death of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, more than 1,300 years ago."

I originally wrote about it here. The cover shows lots of male candidates getting ready in a locker room and Hillary Clinton looking in from the other side of the door. Donald Trump is not in the picture at all, but it would be Donald Trump who, weeks before the election, would get in trouble for something he and his supporters would try to pass off as "locker room talk."

We started with 8 and got down to 4. Let's pit the winners of the playoffs against one another. I'm not saying there won't be more rats competing in future Most Loved Rat fights, but let's have a championship round now, while we need it so badly. The playoff winners are Rattatz...

Lavrov is sober: "Well, I don't know what this would… English is not my mother tongue, I don't know if I would sound decent. There are so many pussies around the presidential campaign on both sides that I prefer not to comment on this."

Do you have to be careful when speaking a foreign language... or does it work as license to say something that you don't really need to take responsibility for?

Is "pussy" a word we can say? A all-female punk rock group can use it, but that doesn't clean up the word for general usage.

I love the way Lavrov uses self-deprecation to claim greater freedom: English is not my mother tongue. I wouldn't say "tongue" so close to "pussy," but I'm a native English speaker. Lavrov can't be thought to have intended any double meaning there.

And I love how Lavrov totally made a comment and then pretended he didn't by saying he prefers not to comment. The comment was: "There are so many pussies around the presidential campaign."

Christiane Amanpour giggled and claimed not to have expected that.

But what "pussies" did Lavrov mean? Was it a reference to women in general? Was it the women who have been thrust into the spotlight by sexualizing moves by Trump and Bill Clinton? Was it a reference to Hillary Clinton and the many women around her? Is it not the sex meaning at all by the idea of pusillanimousness — the timidity or weakness associated with kittens and women? Why would Lavrov say that?

It's hard to know what he means... other than perhaps: You Americans are so weak compared to us Russians.

“I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here,’” said Mariah Billado, the former Miss Vermont Teen USA. Trump, she recalled, said something like, “Don’t worry, ladies, I’ve seen it all before.”

He's saying that to teenagers. Maybe the 4 women are not being completely honest — they might oppose him as a political candidate — but you have that corroborating statement from Trump himself. And look how his statement is an idea we've heard before: "I sort of get away with things like that" is like "They let you do it.... Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything" and not all that different from "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."

"Wellesnet," the online Orson Welles news and fan site has noted that Donald Trump's campaign is coming, more and more, to resemble the doomed election bid of Charles Foster Kane in the 1941 film. One will remember that things for Citizen Kane started to come unraveled when he threatened, at a big rally, to prosecute his opponent once elected.

"But here's one promise I'll make and Boss Jim Gettys knows I'll keep it," Kane says. "My first official act as governor of this state will be to appoint a special district attorney to arrange for the indictment, prosecution and conviction of Boss Jim W. Gettys."

As Wellesnet recounts, in turn, "Gettys destroys Kane's political aspirations by leaking a sex scandal involving Kane in the final stretch of the campaign."

Citizen Kane was a movie about a character who, of course, didn't think of himself as a character in a movie. He was not aware of the drama of his story arc. He was not motivated to crank it up into the greatest story that ever hit the big screen.*

Donald Trump is a real man. He is witnessing the approach of doom. Maybe he holds onto some shred of hope — he's a fighter, he likes to win — but that's all the more reason to make his story as interesting as possible, for the inevitable movie or movies — who knows how many movies there will be over the years? Donald Trump has 4 more weeks to write the story that will be enacted in those movies he sees coming.

Alec Baldwin, his "SNL" impersonator, is a great and serious dramatic actor. Surely, Baldwin will get a movie made. I look forward to the meta material. Baldwin will play 2 roles — oh, should I shut up and just write the screenplay? — Trump and Alec-Baldwin-as-Trump mocking Trump on "SNL." We see Baldwin/Trump seething and scheming as he watches Trump/Baldwin imitating him.

He's seething and scheming and then he laughs maniacally. Suddenly, he envisions the movie that will be made.

For decades they've been saying that "Citizen Kane" is the greatest movie of all time, but my movie will be bigger and greater. It will be huuuge. Because this really happened. Not just a stupid sex scandal that brought Kane down — a tawdry little thing — but a torrent of craziness like nobody ever saw. A sex scandal — that's Bill Clinton crap and Bill Clinton's crap is already part of my story. My story! It will all be in there. The aging actresses — they're always looking for parts — they'll be falling over each other trying to get the roles of Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey and that other one, the 12-year-old that Hillary laughed at. And I've got all the young women too. So many roles! All the beauty queens — Alicia Machado — and the journalists who all ganged up against me. Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly will beg to play the part of herself in my movie. My movie! There's Nancy O'Dell and that actress in the purple dress — the one I took the Tic Tacs for — and Ivanka — Ivanka! — and Hillary herself. Hillary! Ha! Streep wants that. Streep will beg on her knees for that. Of course, Streep will do it. Streep or any one of those old actresses hot for a meaty role — a meaty roll with Bill. Heh. Who will play Bill? Who cares?! The question is me! Baldwin will do it. Of course! It's such a great role. What am I saying? The story isn't over yet. The climax hasn't even happened. This real-life story is still getting written — by me, the greatest character in the history of movies. The greatest movie scriptwriter in history. Writing in real life. Writing history moment-by-moment, tweet-by-tweet, impromptu splutterings on stages in front of millions. I can play out whatever crazy real-life destruction — ha ha ha ha ha look out, Paul Ryan! — any destruction-of the-GOP fantasies I want and it's all part of The True Story of Donald Trump. I can say anything, do anything — grab them by their pussy, shoot a guy on 5th Avenue — and it's actual true story, history-of-the-United-States-of-America, craziest thing that ever happened. It's big. It's huge. It's bigger than President of the United States. Fuck President of the United States. You can take that lousy job, Hillary. I am become bigger than you ever imagined becoming! President of the United States — it's just a childish conventional dream. You didn't build that. Go. Live in that ugly little house. It's not like you can actually push the nuclear button. Knock yourself out "fixing" Obamacare and war-and-peace-ing the Middle East for 4 years. Good luck with the America that's going to hate you. Like they already hate you. They're voting for you, but I assure you, Hillary, they hate you. And they're gonna love me — me, the greatest character in the greatest movies, the most movies and the best movies ever made. And fuck you too, Citizen Kane.

________________________

* Citizen Kane was based on a real person, William Randolph Hearst, but he didn't want to be a character in a movie, and he wasn't motivated to live his life, as defeat approached, to maximize the entertainment value of the story if it were presented in movie form. My point in this post is that the more it is apparent to Donald Trump — in these last 4 weeks — that he will lose the election, the more he may fixate on accomplishing something else, such as the destruction of the GOP as we know it or the ruination of the presidency that doesn't get to be his. Trump is an entertainer and he's been entertaining us all along and he has reason to think that he will be entertaining America forever as a character in our history. How big of a character can he be? He wants to be huge.

"Simon Beck is a snow artist who creates huge designs in the snow by simply walking in a pair of snowshoes... This short documentary by Flash Studio follows Beck's preparations for a piece he did in Stryn, Norway, on a day of good snow."

Lovely photography. Settle in and watch to the beautiful reveal in the end.

"But what I cannot and will not accept is the way this man goes after entire groups of Americans. His comments about the way he feels entitled to grope women are deeply disturbing — but he says it's just 'locker room talk.' When pressed on Sunday night, he doubled down on his excuses and refused to admit he'd done anything wrong."

Says Hillary Clinton in email I received this morning. She's hitting me up for a contribution. (I never contribute to any candidate.) She says "He's shown us again and again how deeply unfit he is to be president. I'm absolutely unwilling to take even the smallest chance that he might win — are you?" That's a good pitch.

Anyway, I disagree with the statement that Trump, at Sunday's debate, "refused to admit he'd done anything wrong." I don't even accept that he said "it's just 'locker room talk.'" He said it "was locker room talk," but not that it was just locker room talk. He also said that he was "not proud of it" and that he "very embarrassed by it" and "I hate it." He also apologized — to his family and to the American people. And he segued to saying ISIS is way worse and, later in the debate, what Bill Clinton did to women was "far worse." To say something else is worse is inherently to say that something is bad. To apologize is to say that what you did was wrong. And to say you are "not proud" of something is to say it was wrong. So even though he began by calling his remark "locker room talk," he didn't stop there.

I know that many of his defenders do stop there. That hurts him. Helps him with hardcore fans, but they're not enough to win, and they drag him down. I think he fought hard for his cause on Sunday night, and he did about as well as he could, but he doesn't have supporters of a kind that could detoxify him. Without middle-of-the-roaders capable of conceiving of embracing him, he's getting smeared up stinkily by those who love him best.

He imagined himself as the star who "can do anything": "They let you do it.... Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything." Now, he's even more famous, and he's toxic — so repellent that Hillary can raise money off the fear of "even the smallest chance that he might win."

This is ridiculous drama. When you call someone a "pussy" to mean that they are timid, you are referring to the little animal, the kitty cat. It's like calling someone a mouse. It shouldn't even be regarded as a bad word.

The traditional art-school drawing from the model — and I've been there, done that a thousand times — becomes a different kind of event — supposedly! — when somebody famous strips down and sits/lies/stands there for the students — who are surprised to find themselves scrutinizing and delineating... Iggy Pop.

You can see the drawings at the Brooklyn Museum... even though the drawings are merely conventional life-class drawings. It's hard to see why they deserve a museum show. The "conceptual art" — such as it was — is lost in the past, the performance of Iggy in the room, surprising people by behaving like an ordinary life-class model, transforming the experience in whatever way it was transformed. You can't see that at the Museum.

The Museum is trying to make up for the shortcoming with additional artwork — "works depicting male bodies from the Museum’s collections... from ancient Egypt, Africa, India, Japan, and Mexico, as well as prints and drawings by Egon Schiele and Max Beckmann, and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge and Robert Mapplethorpe." This way the show will, we are told, "examin[e]the representation of masculinity across a larger
international and historical spectrum."

The museum also portrays the exhibit as part of its "Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum." How does the depiction of the male body fit into reimagining feminism? Well, that's the point, isn't it?, you're supposed to reimagine. But wait, I will help: The male body is designed to fit into the female. The female naturally encompasses the male, both in heterosexual intercourse and in pre-birth existence.

From Meade's sung-to-the-tune-of-"Ben" song, posted on yesterday's Most-Loved-Rat post, which was at the top of the blog from 10:48 a.m. yesterday until 9:02 today.

Perhaps you wondered if this blog had ended with a whimper — a squeak from Rattatz...

... and Mr. Bone....

No, I am back. The Altexit plan has been implemented, but that only relates to law-proffing, not blogging, and part of the idea is to free the blog to go where it will go without tethering to teaching and the ineffable moral pull of the old scolding "You, a law professor."

"There were no boundaries around those things. But yeah, she was a very concerned parent otherwise, when it came to keeping me alive. What was — I hate this word — but 'normal' for me is what most people consider marginal and extraordinary in their childhoods. So I didn't think about these things as being anything other than what I encountered in my everyday life."Says the actress Gaby Hoffman, whose mother was Viva:

"Every expert smeller I met practiced it thousands of times. Pick up a bottle of perfume. Crush leaves between your fingers. I enjoy smells more now. They’re no longer good or bad. They tell me about the world. That’s as close as I get to being doglike."

It wasn't much of a "town hall" debate was it? I felt sorry for those people who had to sit and be background for 90 minutes. There were so few of them. Each one stood out and had to sit still and look alive, but though they were few, most never got called on. Those who did get a shot asked the most simple, pathetic questions. As I try to recall the questions this morning, they all seemed to be a short plea: What will you do to encourage people like me?

The candidates mostly ignored the person and even the question and plugged in something they wanted to talk about. They never did any of the sort of emotive, bonding-with-the-questioner performance that we are urged to think of when we hear the words "town hall debate." They ran out the clock, and then one of the moderators — in the guise of a "follow-up" question — would replace the "town"person's question with something more specific.

Here's the transcript of last night's debate. I'm going to read the questions and test myself. Am I right about what I just said? (Or do you need me to talk about the fly that landed on Hillary Clinton's face or the way Trump and Hillary didn't shake hands at the beginning and did shake hands in the end? Meade wanted me to rewind and get a video of the fly's antics. I could be first with the news of the fly! Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. We rewound and laughed a lot, but I left it to the internet to take the pictures.)

Question 1 came from a teacher. She wanted to know if the candidates "feel" they are "modeling appropriate and positive behavior for today’s youth." Hillary, going first and setting the tone, boosted the ego of the townswoman by pronouncing her question "very good" and "important." She then proceeded to ignore the question and go into her standard line "our country really is great because we’re good." That's been her pat answer to Trump's banal "Make America Great Again." So when Trump got his turn, he knew where to go: His "whole concept" has been "to make America great again." A typical cascade of short sentences flowed out of that mental prompt, and nothing got back to the townswoman's question.

Said Maureen Dowd, on "Fox News Sunday" today, when Chris Wallace asks her how much damage Hillary Clinton will suffer from the leaked speeches she gave to Wall Street insiders.

But quite aside from Donald Trump and his distracting, self-destructive high-jinks. The pro-Wall Street stuff in the speeches isn't going to hurt her now. As Dowd put it:

I think it would have been lethal during the primaries, but now not so much because, you know, in many ways, she is the GOP candidate. She's the one who cuddles up to hedge funds, and she's the shill of Wall Street. So, it's only what we already knew.

She is the GOP candidate.

ALSO: From the same panel discussion, I was struck by a negative reference to Abraham Lincoln. It's from Chris Wallace:

[T]here was also a passage in one of her big money speeches in which Clinton invokes Lincoln fighting for the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery and saying, you need both a public and a private position. This goes to the core, as I was talking to Maureen, about what people don't trust about this woman.

So what Trump said was "And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

And Jake Tapper obviously didn't want to say "pussy":

If you're going to use the anatomical term to avoid the slang, use the scientifically correct term. "Vagina" for "vulva" is as much slang as "pussy." "Pussy" is at least a quote. "Vagina" is ridiculous.

No one was picturing grabbing a woman by the vagina. If we were, those of us who are saying that Trump was referring to sexual assault would be saying rape, not merely sexual assault.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

(CNN) Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump called Monday for barring all Muslims [who grope] from entering the United States.

"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of [groping] Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," a campaign press release said.

And:

In the wake of the [Donald J. Trump groping] attacks, a prominent Muslim imam, Sami Abu-Yusuf, told reporters women were to blame because they “dress half naked and wear perfume.” The outrageous claim prompted [Democratic Party vice president candidate Tim Kaine] to file a criminal complaint against the cleric.

Let me give an example of something I am seeing. With 55K shares on Facebook:

That's so obtuse, in so many ways. Let's count:

1. "50 Shades of Grey"? Hadn't seen that talked about in a while. (Wait. There is this.)

2. Boasting of committing what sounds like criminal sexual assault is not the mere saying of words. The size of the outrage isn't about the words as bad words, but the words as evidence of actions allegedly taken.

3. The outrage isn't limited to women. Men, too, are outraged.

4. Many people — women and men — are fine with using the words "fuck" and "pussy" in private conversation.

5. The words "fuck" and "pussy" can be used in sentences that express contempt and disregard for other human beings, and the outrage against Trump's words has to do with what the words express in the sentences actually spoken. Many excellent sentences can be made using those words — sentences that can be received with favor by women who hate what Trump said.

6. People read novels and see movies about all sorts of things, including horrible things. Stories about murder and torture and all kinds of physical and psychological abuse are very popular. The effect is titillating, but that doesn't mean people want these things actually to happen to them.

7. You may love a particular character in a story, because he's interesting and exciting and transgressive, but that doesn't mean you want him to be President. I love the movie "My Dinner with Andre," but Andre Gregory would be a terrible President. Last night, I watched the movie "Willard." Willard is a fascinating character. Watching him bond with rats, train them, gather them into suitcases and carry them into the office to unleash havoc was fascinating... oh, watch out, pussy!...

... but Willard would not make a good candidate for President. Neither would Hannibal Lecter.

8. It would be interesting to see those rats overrun the White House... in a movie. But not in real life!

9. Fantasy time is over. Put down the novel. Turn off the movie. Face the grim reality of picking a suitable President.

10. I said it 2 years ago: I'm for boring. I mean for President. I'm not talking about novels and movies and sexual fantasies.

11. "OK. Yes, we are bored. We're all bored now..."

"... but has it ever occurred to you... that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks, and it's not just a question of individual survival... but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?"